CEO of Gig-work Surveillance Firm Resigns

Maury Blackman resigned from Premise Data this week after years of court battles, the exposure of Premise's clandestine surveillance, and publication of his felony domestic violence arrest.

2023-12-19: After publication of this article, Premise updated its leadership page to confirm Matt McNabb as the company’s new CEO. Mr. McNabb also replaced Maury Blackman on Premise’s board of directors, and both Alex Moore and David Soloff were removed.

Launched in late 2013 by punk-rock-drummer-turned-venture-capitalist David Soloff, Premise Data became an obscure, data-gathering analogue of Uber, paying small fees to gig workers in exchange for tasks such as taking photos of the shelves at supermarkets or polling West Africans about their view on Niger’s coup. But despite securing an investment from Google Ventures, a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and landing former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers on its board, Premise’s revenue stalled. Soloff was subsequently replaced in early 2018 as CEO by Maury Blackman, who led the government digitization company Accela for more than fifteen years and joined the board of a police data sharing company now owned by SoundThinking, the company formerly known as ShotSpotter.

According to a statement from Premise Marketing Director Dora Kuo obtained by Allbritton Journalism Institute reporter Byron Tau and shared with the author, Mr. Blackman resigned as CEO of Premise earlier this week and “transitioned to an advisory role”. His departure appears to be a response to years of reckless behavior, including a felony domestic violence arrest and dragging Premise into a multi-year lawsuit against former employees in which Blackman accidentally confirmed the company’s covert military surveillance through a legal filing. Ms. Kuo further noted that Blackman has been replaced as CEO by Matt McNabb, the former CEO of competitor Native who became Premise’s Chief Strategy Officer after Premise acquired Native in 2021.

As of publication of this article, Premise’s website still lists Mr. Blackman as the company's CEO. Prior to confirmation from Premise of Blackman’s replacement by McNabb, the author received an anonymous tip that Premise’s board of directors demanded the replacement on Friday, December 8, before announcing it to the company the following Monday alongside notice of layoffs.

The board that allegedly demanded Mr. Blackman’s termination includes Alex Moore, the first employee of the data fusion giant Palantir, who has since become an investor at 8VC, a venture capital firm led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Until earlier this week, Blackman was listed alongside Moore and Lonsdale as a board member of Esper, a company which describes itself as “building a data-driven policy solution”. Mr. Blackman and Mr. Moore did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Mr. McNabb or numerous other members of Premise’s board.

In a series of bizarre events spanning October and November, someone operating under the pseudonym “Christian Erics[s]en”, and claiming to represent Mr. Blackman, committed perjury by filing a fraudulent Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown request against the author. The target of the fraudulent copyright enforcement attempt was the San Francisco Police Department incident report detailing Blackman’s 2021 felony arrest for domestic violence, which Mr. ‘Eric[s]en’ earlier attempted to pay the author to retract from the internet.

A photo of former Premise CEO Maury Blackman which was published on the company’s leadership page. Mr. Blackman reportedly resigned from Premise earlier this week.

The consequences of Premise’s handover in 2018 from Mr. Soloff, a former punk rocker, to Mr. Blackman, a government surveillance executive, were immense, including spurring a multi-year lawsuit in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County which is set to go to trial in March. Beyond clashes in management style, by April 2019 Premise had sued former employee Alex Pompe for allegedly alerting the Gates Foundation to the company’s recent expansion into covert surveillance operations for the U.S. military, claiming that “Pompe came to work as a saboteur” and that “numerous employees left in 2018 as a result of Pompe’s conduct”.

Two years after the lawsuit was filed, The Wall Street Journal exposed Premise’s covert military surveillance work, including by publishing Premise’s May 2019 pitch to the unified command for all unconventional warfare conducted by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan (CJSOTF-A). Premise promised that its “600K+ local data contributors”, including 340 in Afghanistan, could perform tasks such as mapping cell towers and wifi networks, surveilling activity around mosques and internet cafes, and conducting information operations under cover of polling.

(The author of The Wall Street Journal’s exposé on Premise, Byron Tau, is slated to publish a book on commercial surveillance companies such as Premise in February, through Penguin Random House, titled “Means of Control”.)

Premise was awarded a $459,846 contract three months later with the same title, “A Dynamically Re-taskable, Global System for Persistent Ground ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance]”, supporting Air Force components of Special Operations Command Africa . The “SOF [Special Operations Forces] ISR Integration Team Lead” for the contract, former 501st Military Intelligence Brigade commander Jason Chung, had been hired the same month as Premise’s pitch to CJOTF-A, according to Mr. Chung’s LinkedIn profile.

In the last two years, Premise has received tens of millions of dollars in public payouts through subcontracts under Defense Department components such as U.S. Cyber Command. But the company is best known for having been accused in February 2022 — just two months after Mr. Blackman’s arrest — of being used for targeting by the Russian government during their invasion of Ukraine. The company also announced its support for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Myanmar Analytical Activity just last month.